Former Dell exec Kash Shaikh has joined Virtana as CEO, And ex-Hazelcast CFO Marion Smith has replaced longterm CFO Peter Dayton.
The appointments are part of an overhaul of the C-suite at the application and infrastructure monitoring company, conducted by exec chairman Ron Sege, who joined the company in April.
Sege said Shaikh is an “executive with a proven track record of business transformation in data centre and cloud markets, Kash is the right person to lead Virtana as we help our Global 2000 customers and their partners use our high-fidelity data sets to plan and optimise their hybrid cloud migrations for cost, capacity, and performance.”
“He has hands-on experience in every aspect of the business necessary to our success and is known for building and motivating great teams.”
Shaikh was Global VP and GM for Dell Technologies’ Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions business. His CV includes a Global Marketing and Business Development VP role at Ruckus Wireless, which was acquired by Brocade. If Shaikh brings a Dell mindset to his new role we can expect the channel to play a large part in Virtana’s future.
Backstory
Prior CEO and president Philippe Vincent left Virtana in April, with no succession plan. Virtana got its new exec chairman, Ron Sege, who took over as interim CEO. Just before his appointment Virtana also replaced CMO Len Rosenthal with Scott Leatherman from Interana, and Lisa Alger was promoted from SVP Engineering and Development to COO.
In May Virtana announced a $15m funding round from existing investors HighBar Partners and Benhamou Global Ventures. John Kim, Managing Partner at HighBar, said: “Virtana is poised for worldwide growth in the hybrid cloud infrastructure optimisation market with this new investment and the guidance of Ron Sege.”
The most recent funding event before this $15m infusion was $10m debt financing six years ago, in 2014.
In eight months Virtana has had a new chairman, CEO, CFO, CMO and COO, and secured $15m in funding. Vincent resigned in the middle of the pandemic, with Sege coming on board to spearhead growth.
We interpret this as indicating that Virtana’s business was heavily affected by Covid-19. The investors decided the exec roster needed overhauling and the company needed extra funding as well. So the CEO was effectively resigned. Now Virtana is focusing on using the public cloud to serve socially-distanced customers and help them lower CAPEX and OPEX. That’s the route it sees to getting growing again.
